As I Descended. Robin Talley

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      “Everybody knows that story,” Tamika interrupted him. “The ambassadors tell it to you on the tour.”

      Maria’s eyes drifted in and out of focus as she gazed from face to face. Room parties always felt endless.

      “Yeah, but did you know the security guards still hear them?” Kei said. “They said you can hear the soldiers marching out on the grounds at night. They say that one lieutenant—the one who was shot by his own soldiers—you can still hear screaming at midnight when the moon’s full.”

      “Oh, that’s so not true,” Emily said.

      “I’ve never heard any soldiers, and I’ve been going to this school since the fourth grade,” Ryan said.

      “Yeah, that’s bull,” Tamika said. “Like the one about the ghost of the old lady who’s supposed to come sit on your chest and smother you at night. Or the rampaging Indian spirits who stalk little kids. I mean, come on.”

      “They’re not Indians, they’re Native Americans,” Caitlin said. “And you’d be pissed too if your land got invaded and your whole tribe got slaughtered.”

      “Yes, please, tell me more about the evil things white folks have done,” Tamika said.

      “Has anybody ever seen the kids on the lake?” Caitlin asked.

      A hush fell over the room.

      Oh God. Had someone else seen the kids on the lake? Maria had been sure she was the only one.

      “Have you?” Austin asked.

      “Well, no,” Caitlin said. “But you know the story, right?”

      “Oh, sure,” Ryan said. “I mean, they teach that story to all the ambassadors, too. But it’s bullshit about there being stupid lake ghosts. Come on.”

      “Wait, what story?” Mateo asked.

      “The little kids say the lake has ghosts,” Ryan said. “The true part of the story is, back in the seventies, when the school grounds first got extended to include the lake, there were three kids who drowned all in one night.”

      Everyone was quiet for a moment. It was one thing to think about Civil War soldiers dying on their campus, but the seventies weren’t that long ago.

      “That’s why no one’s allowed to swim there,” Kei added. “I heard there’s, like, a whirlpool way out in the deep part that sucks you under.”

      “The little kids think there’s a bogeyman who grabs you and drags you to the bottom,” Ryan said. “I think the school made that up so people would be too scared to go swim there. Like the one about the football players.”

      “No, that one’s true too,” Mateo said. “I heard it before I came here. My parents told me they’d kill me if I ever went near the football field during a thunderstorm.”

      “That’s an urban legend,” Ryan said. “You can’t really die just because you’re on a football field and lightning hits the goalposts. Do you pay attention in physics at all?”

      “But the one about the lake is totally true,” Caitlin said. “There are pictures of the kids who died in an old yearbook. They were a guy and two girls and they were all in, like, a love triangle.”

      “A love triangle?” Austin said. “Spare me.”

      Maria had seen the kids on the lake. And there were four of them, not three. But she’d only told Lily and Brandon about that.

      Brandon. Oh God, Brandon. She still had to figure out what to say to him about last night.

      He’d pulled her into a side corridor that morning after class, breaking away from Felicia, the little freshman who always followed him around like a puppy.

      “What the hell happened last night?” Brandon had whispered to Maria. “Did you have a psychotic break or something?”

      “Of course not.” Maria had shifted her backpack strap on her shoulder, her heart pounding. She should’ve come up with some reasonable-sounding explanation, but all she’d been able to do since the chandelier fell was replay the spirit’s message in her head. The chiming voice she’d heard sing each line as the planchette spelled them out.

      “So what was that?” Brandon asked. “How was that thing writing stuff when you and Lily had your eyes closed?”

      “I don’t . . .” Maria shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. It was just a game.”

      “Just a game my ass. You took it seriously.”

      Maria kissed Brandon on the cheek, the way she did when she wanted to make him laugh. It didn’t work this time.

      He shrugged. “We can talk about this later, I guess.”

      Maria nodded and promised to meet him during dinner tomorrow at the corner table by the salad bar, where they could talk without being overheard.

      She’d have to figure out some way out of it between now and then. There was no way she could tell Brandon the truth.

      Maria wished she’d never told him about any of it. The mirror on her grandmother’s porch—or the strange things that had happened when she was younger.

      It was just that before Lily came along, Maria had never had anyone to talk to. Not anyone who actually understood her. Brandon was so good at listening.

      It had been that way ever since he’d first come to Acheron. They’d put him at the bio table next to Maria’s, and when he’d been too squeamish to slice open his fetal pig, Maria had snuck over and done all his incisions at lightning speed. Maria, it turned out, was something of a fetal-pig-dissection prodigy.

      They sat together at lunch after that. Brandon gave Maria his yogurt as a thank-you present. He told her she had the prettiest eyes he’d seen since Enrique Iglesias’s. Maria asked who Enrique Iglesias was. They’d been best friends ever since.

      That was before she got to know Lily. Before she understood what it meant to really care about someone. To feel like you’d disappear into the air if that person wasn’t always right beside you.

      But it took years for Maria to understand that. In the meantime, she told Brandon about all of it. The voices that whispered outside her room at night when she was little, low enough that she couldn’t make out the words. The time in kindergarten when she woke up in the middle of the night to see her Raggedy Ann doll laughing at her from the shelf over her bed.

      About how sometimes, even in the middle of August, she’d walk past a certain spot in a room and feel an icy chill, the room growing so cold she could see her breath. She’d know someone was watching her, but when she turned, she saw only her own shadow.

      She’d told Brandon about the worst time, too. She’d been eight years old then. She was fast asleep when she felt a weight settling onto the edge of her bed. She opened her eyes, expecting to see her mother, but the room was empty, save for that icy chill. And the faint outline of a little boy with black eyes sitting on the foot of her bed.

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